Gender and Madness in the Novels of Charles Dickens

by Marianne Camus

The 19th-century British writer can by no means said to be liberated from Victorian patriarchal ideology, admits Camus (Dijon U.), but she finds that his madwomen are different, more human somehow, than his sane heroines. That indicates to her that he had a different perception of gender, even if half-conscious, than his peers; and that imagination is one of the ways of getting closer to the truth. She looks at patterns of madness; public and private spheres; madness visible; the discourse of madwomen; and women, power, and punishment in his major novels. The text is double spaced. Only names are indexed. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

98 pages, Hardcover

First published November 22, 2004

Reviews

[Jenny · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author, a French literary professor, opened the book by noting that Dickens had almost an equal number of mad characters of both genders, a stark contrast with the perception and findings of the time, which held that women had a higher percentage of madness than men. I was intrigued as few authors would brave such a challenging work, analyzing a broad and subjective topic such as madness. Halfway through the book, I felt duped. The author kept talking about madness in mostly female characters, a contrast to her original tone. Worse, she also favored Little Dorrit above all, as she frequently returned to it and analyzed the female characters there at length.

The author also warned readers that this "madness" analysis of Dickens' novels would not be psychologically based but rather from a literal view. Alright, I was still curious to push on. There was no definition of what "madness" entailed to the author, specifically if she chose to forgo the general guidelines from psychiatry to distinguish whether someone was eccentric, having a momentary emotional and passionate expression, or was outright unable to tell reality from a hallucinatory episode. As a result, the book meandered throughout, discussing the vast and subjective topic of "madness" whenever such emotion struck the author.

The unfocused prose jumped from characters and books to others within Dickens' work without any specific themes, as "madness" remained generally vague from the beginning. I still did not get what point she was trying to make by the end of the book. A professor of literature should be well equipped to convey their points.

There was not enough background on the characters for readers unfamiliar with particular Dickens works. The title sounded vague, and the chapters felt aimless. I don't know whether French communicated like this or if it was my misinterpretation of a translation, though I think the author wrote this analysis in English.

Overall, I was left confused, bewildered, and slightly "mad".